I did implement Discourse at a large organization (100000+ direct employees) and they already had a catch all intranet solution, with their own Forum-like thing.
I deployed Discourse alongside it, in a different domain as a shadow IT service.
After a few months it overtook the official forums organically, and 3 years later it’s still growing.
Key aspects for success in my experience:
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Integration (@sam helped me integrate avatars, @neil helped me with subfolder, I had a blast writing a custom SSO in LUA)
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Let people figure it out and don’t try to control it too much.
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Play to the Discourse strengths. Internal blogs crave for a integrated comment system and exposure. Add links to internal systems in the user card using a simple head customization and custom fields. Make onebox work with intranet sites.
After all, the best product will win. And the Forum solutions I had the displeasure to use in those big intranet systems aren’t great, to put it mildly.